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Island Hopping: Cottage tour highlights, helps passion

Key Lime Parrot Cottage is one of 17 homes to be featured Dec. 8 in Jane Coslick’s Holiday Cottage Tour. Proceeds will benefit the Humane Society for Greater Savannah.

Rich Wittish/For the Savannah Morning NewsPalm Cottage

Rich Wittish/For the Savannah Morning NewsShrimp Cottage

If you’re a creative person, having your work exhibited in a prominent place has to be a satisfying experience.

And having your exhibit benefit a cause you believe in has to make the experience even sweeter.

That’s what happening for interior designer and historic preservationist Janie Coslick, who’s about to have an exhibit that will be spread all over Tybee Island.

The show of her creativity is Jane Coslick’s Holiday Cottage Tour, which will be taking place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dec. 8, the same Saturday as Tybee’s Christmas parade.

The cause — one that’s dear to Janie’s heart — is raising funds for the building of a low-cost spay/neuter clinic that’s a project of the Humane Society for Greater Savannah.

“We’re in the investment stage of creating a clinic that would enable people who can’t afford to get their animals fixed, so they can afford to,” said Janie of the facility, which would spay and neuter dogs and cats in an effort to decrease the number of stray, unwanted animals in our area.

During the past 20 years, Janie has been involved in the restoration and redecoration of 38 cottages on Tybee. They are relatively small residences that Janie has given new life via brightly colored paint jobs and her innovative use of vintage building materials and furnishings.

Seventeen of those cottages — including architectural gems with the intriguing names of “Crabaritaville,” “Island Dog” and “’Tween Waters” — will be on the tour.

“I’ve either lived in them and restored them, or restored them and sold them, or helped other people restore them,” Janie said of the 17, many of which are vacation rental properties.

Four of the 17 structures — “Splash Shack,” “One Bead Cottage,” “A Bohemian Cottage” and “Breeze Inn” — are among six of Janie’s projects that were featured in “Coast: Lifestyle Architecture,” a recently published, 252-page, coffee table-style book profiling 26 island homes scattered along the Eastern Seaboard.

“Breeze Inn,” by the way, is the island getaway of Atlanta’s Mary Kay Andrews, the author of many best-selling novels that take humorous looks at Southern lifestyles.

“Mary Kay wanted a beach house so bad,“ said Janie. “I helped her focus on how to plan her space.”

The two-story “Breeze Inn,” covering some 2,800 square feet, is the largest cottage on the tour, while the 425-square-foot “Old Love Cottage” is the smallest.

Asked about her favorite, Janie said, “There’s something I love about each one of them. I leave a piece of my soul at each one.”

Pressed to make a choice, she eventually tilted toward “A Bohemian,” a brick bungalow in the southern portion of the island that was built in 1946.

“I lived there eight years,“ said Janie, who has an office on Isle of Hope and now resides in a cottage on the north end of Tybee whose name, “99 Steps to the Beach,” belies its location.

“I hated it when I bought it, but I bought it because it was cheap,” she said of “A Bohemian,” which features some curved walls. “It was so ugly, everybody felt so sorry for me because they thought I’d never be able to fix it up.“

Janie’s cottages tour evolved from a dinner meeting in mid-October involving Tybee resident and Humane Society president Shirley Sessions and a couple of her associates.

Via an email, Shirley told me that, during the meeting, “Sandy (McCloud) said that Jane Coslick had offered to help with a fundraiser in some fashion.

“Sandy called Jane, Jane met us, we discussed the cottage tour and agreed that having the proceeds benefit the spay/neuter clinic would be a win-win — since the Humane Society has been trying to raise funds specifically for the clinic for over two years and, at this point, has approximately $170,000 but needs a minimum of $200,000 to jump-start a pilot program.”

Janie said her job was “to secure the cottages” for the tour. “I lined them up in about one day,” she said. “That was what was so special. People were so willing (to have their properties on the tour). Most of them are animal lovers anyway.”

Tickets for the tour are $30 apiece, and that fee includes light refreshments at the North Beach Grill from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Maps of the island showing tour stops will be provided with tickets, which can be purchased at the Humane Society Thrift Shop at 7215 Sallie Mood Drive in Savannah, and on Tybee at Seaside Sisters and the Atlantic Beacon Gallery at 1207 U.S. 80 and at the Atlantic Beacon Co-Op Gallery at 1605 Butler Ave. Tickets are also available at the Humane Society website, humanesocietysav.org.